Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Howdy all!
I'm writing to update you on what I've been up to the past couple months as I prepare for my first trip out to the field in Costa Rica! This past year I've been furiously applying for permits (in English AND Spanish), writing grant proposals and defending my ideas to my dissertation committee. My good friend and collaborator and I have also been designing data sheets, tracking down equipment, finalizing protocols and now we're down to labeling vials and packing!

I will be periodically posting updates here for you all to check out what I'm doing! We will (hopefully) be doing BOTH in-water sampling AND nesting sampling! If I get lucky - I'll get to see a mass nesting event called an arribada, in which hundreds or even THOUSANDS of sea turtles haul out on the nesting beach to lay their eggs in synchrony - and I'll have some awesome videos and pictures to share with you all!

Thanks for keeping up with me and I look forward to posting much more interesting blogs over the next few months!

If you would like to donate or share my story to support my efforts to conserve turtles, please check out www.gofundme.org/seaturtlebrie. Every dollar and share helps!

Hey everybody,
I was recently honored to be featured as the Council Bluffs Community School District Alumni Spotlight! I am so fortunate to have received the opportunity to use AP coursework to help me prepare for college, in fact, I loved college so much, I never left! :-P

I've attached a photo of the featured story, but I hope that you'll go over to their website and check it out: http://cbalumni.org/stories/brianna-myre/. You'll also see mentioned at the end of the story that I'm working on fundraising to help me with the costs of living and doing research in Costa Rica! If you would like to learn more about the project and possibly contribute, please head over to: www.gofundme.com/seaturtlebrie.

Thanks for tuning in and check in with me as the summer progresses, I'll have much more exciting sea turtle action for you very soon!

Hi all! I've been so busy with teaching, coursework and setting up things for my project that I've neglected to post several blogs along the way, although it's been quiet here, trust and believe that it's not quiet in my daily life! Ha! I have a few big announcements:

1. My master's research is officially in-press to be published! I will post more information when I get the proof, that project was a labor of love - I had to garner money, permits, collect samples, analyze them in the lab, statistically analyze the numbers AND write the manuscript with the help of my beloved collaborators. I am so excited to see my first publication go out and can't wait to add more to the list - I am FAR from done!

2. I'm OFFICIALLY leaving Texas for the second half of the summer to conduct my first field experiment in COSTA RICA! It is so important that I get out there this year, and so I'm working with another experienced graduate student as well as a few undergraduate mentees who will benefit from working with experienced sea turtle biologists, including me!

3. I've launched a fundraising campaign to help me get my PhD project going, if you'd like to learn more about the project, I've posted my lengthy description below from the fundraising page. I'm also posting the video below, if you would like to donate, please visit www.gofundme.com/seaturtlebrie. I will be making an effort to personally thank each and every person who donates to me, I'm nearly to $1,000 in just two weeks!!!

I'm a PhD student in Biology at Texas A&M
University-College Station. I have been offered the career opportunity
of a lifetime to work with esteemed Marine Biologist, Chris Figgener
(see her page at https://www.gofundme.com/wuhvd6zj),
who has many accomplishments but her most famous one is the viral video
of the extraction of a straw from the nose of an olive ridley sea
turtle in Costa Rica last summer (watch it again! And please consider
saying no to single use plastics like plastic bags and straws! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wH878t78bw).
We have mutual interests in sea turtle reproduction with very different
specialties that give our collaboration the potential to produce a
large amount of critically important data.

We are especially
interested in this coming season due to the El Niño event, and we need
to test out some novel tools to find out if we can support and justify
an even larger experiment next summer.

The beautiful thing
about this particular study is that any donation will be supporting at
least double the data production of a typical fieldwork-based sea turtle
study because of the unique expertise that Chris and I along with our
collaborators and mentors bring to the table.

Chris and I both
have published or in-press papers in our respective sub-fields at
previous universities in which we designed projects, obtained grant
funding, and applied for endangered species research permits. We also
went out in the field to collect our samples with our collaborators
under state and federal permits, and analyzed samples in the lab.
Finally, we conducted the statistical analyses and wrote the papers with
the help and generosity of our esteemed mentors, and we can't wait to
do it all again!

The results of our master's projects have
driven us into the sea turtle reproduction arena, and we aim to collect
physiological and nutritional data, stable isotopes, genetics,
reproductive, thyroid and feeding behavior regulating hormones, behavior
and movement data, ultrasound documentation of the gonads and more.

I hope that you will consider donating to this project because we plan
to maximize every cent by sharing data and consolidating our resources.
The data we collect in this project will garner many scientific
publications and management implications that will directly improve the
lives of nesting female sea turtles. I aim to develop tools that will be
interesting in terms of evolutionary physiology as well as useful by
providing conservation implications. We also hope that by working with
olive ridley sea turtles, we will be able to learn more about the most
critically endangered sea turtle in the world, the Kemp's ridley.

I also want to add that I would be deeply grateful for any donation
that I receive, no matter the dollar amount. I have been pursuing my
college education for 8 years, and my fieldwork this summer will allow
me to accomplish many personal life goals and bucket list aspirations.
One is that applying for permits and conducting fieldwork in Costa Rica
has and will continue to require the improvement of my Spanish speaking
and reading skills, which are skills I have been pursuing for years of
my college education.

I faced difficult challenges in trying
to make my dream of studying sea turtles happen when it came time for
college – many well-wishing adults told me that everybody wants to study
sea turtles and it just wasn’t something that was a realistic career
choice. I thanked those people for their advice and pursued my dream
anyway.

Luckily, several opportunities to intern around the
country gave me the edge I needed to get into a graduate school that
would allow me to study sea turtle physiology and endocrinology. I am so
grateful to all my collaborators and mentors during my internships and
during my graduate training because you invested in me and have led me
to success in publishing research and traveling to national and
international symposia to present the results of the previous project,
and I am amped up to collect more data and do it again and much bigger
in scope.

One more reason why this project means so much to me
is that I have wanted to work in Costa Rica with mass-nesting sea
turtles since my childhood. It all began when I was about 10 years old, I
inherited two red-eared slider turtles from my uncle, and a turtle
biologist was born. Thank you for reading, watching the video, and
sharing my story. your support means the world to me! If you can donate,
an extra hug to you! You will be helping turtles in a double-whammy of
intertwined projects and supporting the dreams of several biologists who
will help us along the way.

About Me

My name is Brie and I'm a PhD student studying sea turtle reproductive physiology at Texas A&M University-College Station. My goal through pursuing my PhD is to become a comparative endocrinologist, because I love hormones and all that they can tell us about an animal's health, history and status. I am very passionate about using science to develop tools for conservation, and love to teach and work in outreach to help spread the message of how amazing science is and how it can help us and bring more meaning to our lives.